The bay down the street is very shallow. When the tide’s out, you can walk half a mile out on the mud flats. Maybe more; I haven’t measured. So maybe that’s why, in my dream, I was walking in a small town where the sidewalds flood twice a day.
I was angry about the activities of a couple of delinquents, and I think I was going somewhere to complain, or something. On the way home I met a white-haired woman who could, if she would testify or something, put a leash on the juveniles who damaged her property and mine. The tide was in, and the sidewalks were under four feet of water. The poor lady, a visitor to the town, was worried but I told her it’s normal. Just then we heard a “pop!” in the distance. The woman was startled, but I scanned the skies in the direction of the noise and saw an aircraft in the distance. “It’s a plane,” I said. “The pilot has just ejected. Look! there he is. watch for the parachute.”
Sure enough, you could see a little smoking dot and a parachute quickly deployed from it. The F-105 Thunderchief was headed in our direction. We were in water, so we couldn’t run. The crashing “Thud” came right toward us and missed my head by a foot before it crashed in the water behind me.
And that was the end of the dream. I woke up a few seconds later.
The most disturbing part of that to me is that someone was still flying a Thunderchief.
Did you grow up during the Vietnam war, Johnny?
I was a kid during that time, and I had a model of a “Thud” when I was about six.
Bah. That ain’t weird.
I’m in a giant stadium. There’s some kind of game on the field but I never bother to look or listen. There are rooms like empty garages. These have large cards set in the floor. The cards are mounted in swivels. Once a card has been turned over, it can’t be turned back. I know that the stadium is filled with such rooms and that the cards must be turned over in the proper order to solve the puzzle. But the cards aren’t my primary concern. The important thing is that my fellow Cenobites and I take the elevators down to various sections of hell and rescue those trapped there. We seem to focus mostly on freeing other Cenobites from Leviathan’s service. Everything has to be done very carefully, or he’ll be alerted to our presence and we’ll never make it out. Each time we get in the elevator to go back up to the stadium, there is the chance that wires and knives will spring from the walls and begin our endless punishment. Something goes wrong during a rescue. The Cenobites we came to save (who have become life size action figures trapped in a kind of plastic jar) are awake and trying to stop us. We can still rescue them, but it will take precision. Various snap on accessories must be taken up in each trip. Taking the wrong piece will release the enemy Cenobites. Back in the stadium, servobots are pursuing me for some reason. I turn over one of the cards, risking the danger in hopes it will provide a weapon or power up. I manage to push one of the bots through the metal grid in the stadium’s center(there’s no longer a game or field. Just catwalks over a desolate and crowded undercity.)
Suddenly I’m a disembodied prescence following a talkshow host down basement stairs as he recounts the details of grisly murders. He opens a door to a crawlspace, explaining that this is where the killer hid the bodies. We go in. The place is filled with boxes and piles of toys. We find a strange,green-skinned child playing with the toys. The murderer killed his parents and kept him here. Somehow the police never noticed him. I realize that the child is my brother, or must become my brother. He mumbles something to me and extends a hand. The hand holds a huge pile of toys. The designs and materials vary. But all the toys are batlike in some way.
Now, I am the lost child. Unable to speak or to understand most words, but possessed of strange abilities. I can move through the office building with speed and silence beyond belief. I know the hidden ways. I silently kill a middle management guy that nobody likes. He was mean to the girl, the only person I’ve loved since Momma died so long ago. Finally, the bad guys send all the workers out of the dilapidated house (yeah, it’s gone from ultramodern office building to old house). I am a disembodied presence watching the boy now. He is in his late teens now. He dresses in black clothes, wears a black motorcycle helmet with black visor, and carries a big gun. The folks who live there now notice his attachment to the television. He’ll always turn it on to hear certain shows. I am one of the folks in the house now, trying to change the channel on the television. Some of the buttons on the cable box don’t seem to work. The channels don’t go in order when I press up or down. Sometimes the LED display doesn’t show number, but words or strange symbols. I start watching a movie. I am briefly a character in the film. I can’t remember that part of the dream except that it involved trying to be the first to reach something, and mermaids. I am a disembodied presence in the house again. The bad guys have started to learn the secrets of how the nameless boy moves and lives. His diet seems to consist mostly of some very large cockroaches. They bring in a specialist and a team of mercenaries. The specialist knows what television program to use to distract the boy. The specialist can predict the boy’s movements. The boy barely dodges an ambush and a spray from machineguns. The specialist is waiting for the boy when he pops up again. He shoots the boy in the knee with a shotgun. The tension builds and I don’t know if the heroic boy will survive. Then, I wake up.
I was just confronted with a picture from a recurring dream, in another thread, one about caving. It, too is very short.
I’m hiking up a muddy, slippery path. I’m dirty and wet, but not really unhappy about it. I come to a huge boulder. The path circles it. On the other side is the sink.
The dream is like The Wizard of Oz, I’m unaware of color until I see the sink, which is so vivid, I’m dizzy. The dream ends there.
That’s no sink. It’s clearly the throat of ancient dragon who had time for a final scream before it turned to stone.
